Google Buying Wind Power for Oklahoma Data Center

Google April 21 said it is buying 100.8 megawatts of wind power from NextEra Energy Resources over the next 20 years to fuel its forthcoming data center in Oklahoma.

Google
April 21 inked its second clean power purchase agreement, agreeing to buy 100.8
megawatts of wind energy to power its new data center in Oklahoma.
Google
agreed to purchase all of the energy from clean energy provider NextEra Energy
Resources' Minco II wind facility in Oklahoma for the next 20 years.
Google expects its Oklahoma data center, currently under construction on
the windy plains of Mayes County, will be fully operational later this year.

Financial
terms were not made public for this purchase, the search engine's second clean
power purchase from NextEra Energy Resources through its Google Energy unit in
less than a year. Google acquired
114MW of wind power from NextEra's Story II Wind Energy Center in Iowa last
July.

Google,
which secured
the right to buy and sell power from the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission last year, expects to buy enough power to run several data centers.
The company
has built dozens of data centers all over the world, loading them with servers
that power the company's cloud computing network, which supports its search
engine and other Web services.
These
applications consume massive amounts of power, and the company has been working
hard to reduce its carbon footprint, making its data centers as energy
efficient as possible through water cooling and other techniques.

Gary
Demasi, a member of Google's global infrastructure team, said that while
Google's data center techniques have helped reduced the company's energy
consumption by half, purchasing clean energy to fuel its power-hungry data
centers is another way to scale back its emissions.
"We've
made the commitment to be a carbon neutral company, and this purchase is part
of our effort to minimize our impact on the environment," Demasi said in a
blog
post.
Google published this white
paper on its renewable energy purchases.
The
Oklahoma wind power buy caps a busy two weeks of green energy efforts by
Google, which has invested over $350 million in renewable energy projects to
date.
Google
earlier this week invested
$100 million into the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, which is expected to produce
845 megawatts of electricity, or enough to fuel more than 235,000 homes.
Google
April 11 pumped
$168 million into a solar energy power plant BrightSource Energy is building in
California's Mojave Desert.